1970s anxieties about inflation [are being substituted by] today's concerns about the emergence of the plutocratic rich and their impact on economy and society. [Economist Thomas] Piketty is in no doubt, as he indicates in an interview in today's Observer New Review, that the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it.

Wealth inequality rises as 1) return on capital rises faster than both workers' wages and general economic growth (see chart #1, click to enlarge, and for more on the related issue of decreasing income mobility in the U.S. see "Inequality Is Not the Problem", Jeff Madrick, NYR Blog, 2014 ),2) super-high-income workers (e.g., CEOs) reward each other with mega-salaries to "keep up with the other rich" (see chart #2 from "We're More Unequal Than You Think", The New York Review of Books, 2012),3) inherited wealth and corporate gains aren't greatly taxed (compared to the early post-WWII era especially), 4) tax-reduction/-avoidance schemes abound especially for the rich who can afford the experts to manage their money globally, and 5) the cultural and societal insularity of the wealthy, their disconnectedness from the vast majority of those who are not exceedingly wealthy, combines with their money-driven power (e.g., campaign contributions and armies of lobbyists) to keep the system in place. Such power puts me in mind of the old "golden rule"--he who has the gold makes the rules.

Importantly, due largely to #4 above, the middle class ends up with a disproportionate share of the tax burden to keep the social safety net, defense, services (sanitation, policing, fire fighting), education, and transportation infrastructure in place, even though the services, education, and infrastructure benefit the mega-wealthy, too, directly or indirectly.

The result: it becomes more important who you're born to than what job you have or even what business you create. In the situation Piketty describes, not even typical entrepreneurs can ever expect to gain close to the kind of wealth that the rentier class will enjoy, will see grow (faster than will grow wages or the general economy), and will pass on to offspring...largely untaxed.

It might be noted, too, that with the middle-class's retirement funds so tired up in stocks due to the financial innovation of the 401k, the super-rich can use political rhetoric that suggests they and simple shareholders are on the same team, which they are not.

Another key point of Piketty's book is that the mid-20th-century period of reduced wealth inequality and reduced income inequality is the exception, not the rule, because, as a friend of mine summarized, the disruptions of two world wars and the Great Depressions hugely reduced the capital controlled by the upper classes both through direct destruction and by making very high taxation politically possible. (See that plunge in the rate of return on chart #1 above, 1913–1950.)

Stating that capitalism isn't working is not the same as stating that capitalism doesn't work. Piketty seems to promote a mixed economy. As I think it is better understood by the voting public in much of Europe (perhaps especially Germany and the Scandinavian countries) than in the U.S., there is no strict, binary choice between socialism and capitalism. There are myriad gradations in between the two. Capitalism's tendency toward a final winner-take-all result can be curtailed and social unrest kept at bay by policies such as more progressive taxation, global wealth taxes, etc. However, these tactics are not practicable now. Outrage among the voting majority simply isn't great enough to precipitate change. And all of this is hard to tweet, so good luck getting anyone under the age of 30 to give a damn.

Piketty's book stems from many years of work and research. It will take some time for challenges to emerge robustly, but some are already published. Examples include these considerations via Forbes.com. (Scroll down on the linked-to page for additional Forbes posts by Tom Worstall and Scott Winship about possible problems with some of Piketty's ideas. For instance, Worstall suggests that taxation on consumption is a better approach than Piketty's suggestion to tax capital.)

Slightly off-topic but not entirely unrelated: As others have pointed out, one of the factors driving the Scottish independence referendum (September 18, 2014), which I think will pass by a very slim margin, is a laudable consensus among the Scots that they do not want the kind of radical wealth inequality seen in England and the U.S.A. (See, "Scottish nationalists look to Nordic model for independence", Financial Times.) However, whether independence is the best course for lessening or protecting again wealth inequality is arguable. (Personally, I side with Better Together campaign.) The Conservatives who support continued union with Scotland may go down in history as the party that led the Government that lost the 307-year-old union between Scotland and the rest of Britain and [Northern] Ireland, despite their strenuous rhetorical efforts to preserve it. We'll find out in less that 5 months' time.

The Koch Brothers

Also, it is interesting to look in light of Piketty's book at the efforts of the billionaire economic conservative Koch brothers to have surcharges put upon users of solar power. Piketty notes that the very wealthy will engage in various efforts to maintain the status quo, no doubt. As Piketty writes, "The experience of France in the Belle Époque proves, if proof were needed, that no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest."

The assessment of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist David Horsey in his regular "Top of the Ticket" column in the Los Angeles Times is that

the Koch brothers have a new ploy to protect the traditional energy business that helped make them the planet’s fifth- and sixth-richest humans. They are funding a campaign to shackle solar energy consumers who have escaped the grip of big electric utilities.

Of all the pro-business, anti-government causes they have funded with their billions, this may be the most cynical and self-serving.

(Click any image in this post to enlarge it.)

It seems to me that the mega-wealthy, like the Koch brothers, will happily and doggedly seek to further game the system and entrench their wealth through tax havens, low tax rates, falsehoods widely disseminated by their media operations--complete with crocodile tears for the middle class--and the political and societal influence that they buy through campaign contributions, armadas of lobbyists, and, frankly, their "charitable" giving, too. (To give a large donation to an arts institution or medical facility not only offers tax advantages but in a sense puts those entities' workers in your pocket; they daren't speak out or too obviously work to reform the status quo lest they lose a big-money donor, patron, lord.) Those with great wealth will work both to rig the system and to keep the masses' outrage at bay by fueling the narrative of the government as being the only true enemy, by fueling misinformation against whatever hurts their interests, including--in the case of the Koch brothers especially--climate change, and by fueling media coverage of and political focus on non-economic issues.

In the U.S., with the decrease in the public intensity of religious conservatives' concerns about social issues and, arguably, social conservatives dwindling numbers, the economic right-wing (and the self-described libertarian wing) of the U.S. will increasingly attack government in all its forms and experiment with new distractions. Old distractions like gay marriage or the war on drugs are losing their appeal. New ones will be found.

I suspect that the super-massively rich, the top 0.01%, like the Koch brothers, convince themselves that they are patriots. But they ignore the simple fact that liberty as outlined in our republic's founding documents is meant to work alongside--variously in cooperation or in tension with--the Constitution's explicitly stated purpose, among others, to PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE. I believe that the Koch brothers' efforts subvert the general welfare, and in that regard they really are more like oligarchic monarchists, insiders in the lordly court of plutocracy, than true champions of liberty.

Jewish, Welsh, gay-rights champion, abortion opponent, socialist, attorney, Member of Parliament, and author, Leo Abse, is one of the more extraordinary late 20th-century politicians who you've likely never heard of.

In the 1960's, he led the parliamentary effort to decriminalize homosexuality in Britain, helped liberalize divorce law to allow women to divorce for reasons other than adultery, supported nuclear disarmament, and--quite famously so at the time--dressed in flamboyant, tailored suits on Budget Day--the day each year when the Chancellor of the Exchequer presents the Government's budget to the House of Commons.

Additionally,

Abse was the first MP to initiate debates on genetic engineering, the dangers of nuclear power generation at Windcsale, and in vitro pregnacies; and he campaigned to change the law which made attempted suicide a criminal act. (The Telegraph)

A champion of Jewish and Welsh causes, he was not beyond criticizing Israeli military excesses and nonetheless opposed Welsh devolution. Though a social reformer and secular, he held a pro-life/anti-choice stance based in large part upon personal conviction relating to his handicapped son.

He was short, of slight frame, fast-speaking, and sported a pompadour hair style.

Besides his political and legal work, Abse also authored various books looking at political or cultural figures or topics from a psychoanalytical perspective, including his 1997 book, Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love--an attention-getting title if there ever was one. (While lauding his reformist views on gay rights, many social progressives today would find highly problematic Abse's Freudian-based views on homosexuality's causes; however, such views were much more common decades ago, even among liberal social reformers.)

The founder of the Cardiff-based solicitors firm Leo Abse & Cohen, Abse later in life played a key role in solicitors being granted access to the High Court, access previously reserved for barristers only. (In the UK, the legal profession is split between two types of lawyers: solicitors and barristers.)

Abse served in North Africa during World War Two until he was recalled from Cairo in 1944 stemming from his activities surrounding a "Forces Parliament" that had been set up by RAF servicemen to debate the kind of post-war British society they desired.

In the end, controversy entered his personal life, too, when four years after his wife of 40 years died in 2000, Abse, then 83 years old, married a Polish woman 50 years his junior, and upon his death in 2008, in accordance with his will, she received £1 million while his two children received only a few items and no money.

Abse had far more noted influence on UK law than the vast majority of backbenchers usually enjoy in their careers.

Depression – here I use the term in a strictly technical sense – is something very different from sadness; it’s a terrible condition which is always linked to the idea of a final conviction, issued continuously on every moment of one’s life. And here we run immediately into language problems. Far more understandable are the pains of bereavement, poverty, hunger and unemployment. Although depression itself may result from each of these elements, it’s the idea itself that seems to have something wrong. The commodification of the word ‘depressed’ has really destroyed most of its medical semantic value. - Giorgio Fontana, Berfrois.com

Image: John Constable, The Sea near Brighton, 1826. (Click to enlarge.)

On Berfrois's Facebook page, the above by Giorgio Fontana is beautifully accompanied by the Constable painting seen here.

Fontana is correct, depression is not sadness. It's not quiet, either. It's a distracting mental static that at best is mercilessly stupefying, like the sound and motion of waves that are slightly too big to be gently lulling or mesmerizing in effect. quite crashing, but they don't crash like stormy seas, either. Collectively, they are a seemingly inescapable ocean, always ominous, sometimes slightly so, sometimes dreadfully so with occasional swells and fits. A gray sea without sight of land. It is not "feeling a little blue," it is not "having a bad day," and when one is in its shore-less midst ones mood can pitch back and forth at times between desperation and lassitude.

"Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen." - The Book of Common Prayer (1979), The Episcopal Church.

A radical definition of family for a radical definition of sacrifice.

An atheist friend of mine always attends Good Friday services at his local Episcopal Church, the one time each year he crosses the threshold of a house of worship. Once, I asked him why. "Because the f---ing bastards killed Christ." The resurrection he rejects in its literal sense. But, there is for him still the crucifixion, which he recognizes as a distressingly human event, deeply political, and very significant: the horror of betrayal, the abuse of might against right, the exploitation of the mob by cynical figures of authority, the baying for blood, the rejection of meekness, the will to maintain order and the status quo rising up against a new order offered by an unlooked-for messenger; but also the process of positive change through sacrifice, the despair that may later be revealed as a beginning of a new dispensation, if not a metaphysical dispensation then a new way of doing things, a new way of being. Jesus came onto the scene and many people of power felt threatened enough to cause far greater offense in return. There is violence in the story. It is not for the faint of heart.

"The cause of [our ruin] is that riches ride on the wind, and have always so ridden in the form of contract deeds, of bills of exchange, of silver and gold, instead of goods that bear fruit and which, because of their greater worth, attract to themselves riches from foreign parts. And so our inhabitants are ruined. We therefore see that the reason for the lack of gold and silver money [here] is that there is too much of it, and [the nation] is poor because she is rich."

The American dollar is not the world's first global currency. It was the Spain peso de ocho, the silver "piece of eight." The above was written in the 1600's about what had became Spain's worsening economic situation. The hundreds of millions of silver pieces of eight that had been minted and put into circulation by Spain using silver mined, refined, and minted in the New World, mostly in Peru.

Niles MacGregor, director of the British Museum, notes in episode 80, "Pieces of Eight," of BBC Radio 4's A History of the World in 100 Objects:

But the very abundance of [Spanish-mined] silver brought with it a new set of problems. It increased the money supply - much like governments "printing" money, in modern terms. Inflation was the consequence. In Spain, there was bemusement, as the wealth of empire, in both political and economic terms, often seemed more apparent than real. Ironically, silver coin became a rarity within Spain itself, as it haemorrhaged out to pay for foreign goods, while local economic activity declined. As gold and silver vanished from Spain, its intellectuals grappled with the gulf between the illusion and the reality of wealth, and the moral consequences of the country's unexpected economic troubles.

Spanish American conquests made possible "the wealth which walketh about all the countries of Europe," that is, silver coin. It is effectively the first dollar, as Barrie Cook, a curator at the British Museum, explains:

‘Pieces of Eight’ is one of many names for the large silver coins of the king of Spain, a multiple of the basic Spanish denomination, the silver real: so a piece of 8-reales, peso de ocho reales, or peso. It is also the original silver dollar, a name that starts out as a place in the Czech Republic in the sixteenth century and ends as the currency of the modern USA.... Pieces of eight pretty much ruled the monetary world from the 1570s till the French Revolution.

Currencies' values fluctuate; currencies come and some eventually disappear altogether. Those are lessons of history worth considering.

A Victorian slum priest, campaigning for better sanitation, was told to stop interfering in secular matters. He replied, ‘I speak out and fight about the drains because I believe in the Incarnation’. Between 1885 and 1895, another slum priest, Father Dolling, transformed the poorest area of Portsmouth. He created a gym to promote physical fitness and dancing, but his ‘Communicants Dancing Guild’ disgusted a local evangelical vicar. ‘Who can separate the secular from the religious?’, asked Dolling. ‘Certainly the Master did not try to do so.’ He forced brothels to close, attacked army authorities for mismanagement and encouraged trade unions. The worship combined high ritual with hymns sung to homely tunes. Dolling, singing songs with servicemen, was very different from the bookish Tractarians. Why did priests like Dolling begin to connect Jesus with drains and dancing? They learned their incarnationalism and sacramentalism from a tradition which included the theologians F D Maurice, Stewart Headlam, Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland.

Alan Wilkinson in the January 2001 online issue of Franciscan, a publican of the Anglican religious order the Society of Saint Francis, looks at the examples of Maurice, Headlam, Gore, and Holland. Read the article here.

a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, and revolutionary movements. Anti-Judaism is and has long been one of the most powerful theoretical systems “for making sense of the world.” No doubt, Jews sometimes act out the roles that anti-Judaism assigns them—but so do the members of all the other national and religious groups, and in much greater numbers. The theory does not depend on the behavior of “real” Jews.